Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust

>It’s difficult to imagine any new flight search, no matter how innovative, winning today with Google acting as the web’s gatekeeper.

Google results are dominated by the Expedia Group (a conglomerate of tons of different brands: https://www.expediagroup.com/home/default.aspx). While Google's practices have definitely hurt, it's a huge business, and probably a larger reason why a new flight search competitor can't get off the ground.

As a customer, it's annoying there isn't more diversity anymore. Generic travel searches are dominated by these brands, plus articles full of affiliate links that are hard to trust.

While looking at the tables of good versus bad phrasing I couldn't shake the feeling that I was reading something not so dissimilar to how leaders of organized crime historically avoided prosecution. By not naming the crime, by speaking about it indirectly and with softer language, they hoped to invigorate doubt in a hypothetical jury.

It's a method of avoiding responsibility oft credited to Henry II, who stated off-hand "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

When I was at IBM 15 years ago, IBM was far from being a monopoly, since there were plenty of competitors in the hardware space (HP, Sun, Dell, etc) and in the software space (Oracle, SAP, etc.) and in the Services space (Accenture, PwC, KPMG, etc.) employees still had to complete annual legal training that was very similar to what was described in the post.

Any large company with half-way competent legal counsel is going to tell their employees not to say, "our goal is to crush our competitors, dominate the market, and hear the lamentation of their women." Instead they will tell their employees to focus on making life better for their customers. It's a much healthier way for product managers to focus, and what you might do if the goal is "crush/dominate the competition" is *not* the same than if the goal is delight the customer. So it's not just a messaging strategy to prevent embarassing e-mails from coming out at trial; it's a business strategy, too.

What good would "[putting] their business efforts" towards other companies accomplish, other than cutting off their own air supply? With how much of search is dominated by Google, you have to deal with them if your job is SEO, simply because all of their search competitors combined don't add up to the Big G.

Have you ever been a devout practitioner of a religion whose views on the world differ in key parts from the established scientific consensus?

Have you ever been affiliated with a political party that was highly popular (or a monoparty even) in your country but was held in contempt by the rest of the world because of how totalitarian/inhumane it was?

In both cases, you could read whatever, even critical information about your values. But you would have an explanation ready — enemies envy and slander us, they either know they lie or they are repulsed by the God's light because of how corrupted they are, they are not aware of the whole truth... You would have a whole arsenal to explain things away, because you are committed, and your commitment makes it hurt to realize that the purpose your values serve is not very noble, or that you're a part of something atrocious. It's the human nature.